Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday September 30, 2012 @04:32AM
from the i-heard-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In 2008, Sherrie Walters, now 42 years old, discovered that she had rapidly spreading basal cell cancer in her ear. The disease is a type of skin cancer. The doctors pursued an aggressive treatment to combat the destructive disease, removing her ear, part of her skull, and her left ear canal. Though Walters was left without an ear, she was still able to hear with the help of a special hearing aid. A few months ago, doctors from the renowned Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore decided to try a new procedure on Walters. Using cartilage from her rib, the doctors stitched a new ear to match her right one. Then their creation was implanted under the skin of her forearm, where the ear grew for months. ...Doctors attached the ear and blood vessels surgically. Another surgery, conducted this week, gave the ear shape and detail. Dr. Patrick Byrne, a revered plastic and reconstructive surgeon, says that after the swelling goes down and the ear heals, Walters will have an ear that both looks and functions normally."

It was just the external part of the ear, or pinna. Her inner ear, including the cochlea, must have been functional to some extent because she was able to use a hearing aid (presumably a bone anchored hearing aid). The cochlea is not a 'simple' cartaliginous structure like the pinna. It is a complex sensory organ housed within a fluid-filled bony labyrinth, so not something that could be regrown using the technique described. The closest thing to regrowing a cochlea possible at present is probably stem cell research involving inner ear hair cell and auditory nerve regeneration, although obviously electronic cochlear implants and auditory brain stem implants are available.

It would have been much more impressive (and much more headline-worthy), if she and her medical team had grown a replacement arm from an ear, or other pieces of her body. After all, not even $deity [whywontgod...putees.com] can do that.

What I find really uncanny is that from one perspective this is an example of life imitating art.

The somewhat infamous and critically celebrated Stelarc [wikipedia.org] has conducted a few experiments on his body to attach new sensory organs to his body and connect his body to larger networks. Ping body [nyu.edu] is a pretty famous one, but the one I have in mind is his "Ear on Arm [stelarc.org]". Partially quoting:

The EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm

I remember some health class back in first or second grade where they told us (when talking about ear health and cleaning - q-tips and such) never to put anything sharper than your elbow into your ear. That would have made it sometime in the mid-70s. I thought it was a rather odd statelement back then, and it's still odd today.

Try searching again without surrounding the phrase with quotes. If you let Google do a partial match then it will find plenty of pages with variations on the saying. EG. Never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear.

It is an old saying telling you not to stick things in your ear to clean it of earwax. Not only can you cause damage, but you lose the benefits of earwax.

So why mention the elbow? Because it won't fit in you ear, and you also can't touch your ear with your elbow even if it did fit.

The part of the summary which says "Doctors attached the ear and blood vessels surgically" is talking about surgically attaching them to her head, not her arm, so this actually does seem to be a pretty awesome success.

Over recent years, I've been following such developments with great interest. However, I was under the impression that the plan was to use ears grown on mice and train them to scurry into position... have the plans been changed?

Slashdot reported earlier [slashdot.org] of a new upper jaw grown inside the body, not from the patient's excised bone, but from his stem cells. The operation in this post, as far as I understand, is an established part of modern medicine: epithelial tissue is excised, reshaped and reimplanted. This is not novel; it has been done since World War I.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, they never offered me a job. They have so many profoundly brilliant people there, I'd have drug the place down. Much much kudos to those involved in the research that led to breakthroughs like this one.

I think the more they use this technique, the more likely you can use your own body for
replacement parts. Granted, if you need a heart transplant, you might need it right now, but
for something like congestive heart failure, which would allow time, you could possibly use
your own tissue to grow a new one in a lab, then have it transplanted, and avoiding the use
of antirejection drugs for the rest of your life.